Carson City School District trains on emergency operations

Carson City School District staff and administrators gathered Thursday at Fuji Park for annual emergency preparedness training in collaboration with the Carson City Sheriff’s Office and the Carson City Fire Department.

This year, district employees refreshed their first aid, engaged in tabletop exercises and received an overview on a standard reunification plan at a school site or offsite location in the event of an emergency. Local responders were available to explain their own management systems and the logistics of establishing incident command.

“We do training with all of our school sites on emergency operations, and this year, we decided to introduce some tabletop exercises on parent reunification and using the standard response method,” district risk manager Ann Cyr said.

The method provides greater flexibility to handling hazards and threats and anyone taking part can easily be trained to evacuate and directed through drills.

This year’s training revealed resources to the district not already previously known, according to public information officer Dan Davis. The new access will assist responders and administrators to notify the public when criminal acts or natural disasters are happening, according to Carson City emergency manager Tom Raw.

“We have two emergency management systems that we have access to where we can notify people of an incident that happens at a school and tell parents where to pick kids up or drop them off or tell them what to do,” Raw said. “In the event the school district’s notification system goes down, we have backups for them.”

The important component is retaining scalability and flexibility per campus, Assistant Sheriff Jerome Tushbant said.

“We can also adjust, depending on what the emergency is, what the school is, the age of the people,” he said. “I commend Ann that she’s able to get everyone in this room. The first step was to train, and the second was to do these tabletop exercises. The third step is to do the exercises.”

The schools, once in session, are expected to conduct drills to be scheduled in conjunction with community partners to reinforce the training and practice staging in the event of an emergency at their sites.

District staff members also received basic trauma training through a campaign called Stop the Bleed. Bleed control kits for the district were provided by the Quad-County Public Health Preparedness program at Carson City Health and Human Services and paid for through a federal grant.

Materials for the standard reunification method were provided by the I Love U Guys Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on school safety and was founded in 2006 in Bailey, Colo. Cyr said many school districts nationally have adopted this method and train accordingly.